BuzzFeed in global push, hires foreign editor

Jun 10, 2013

BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith is pictured on May 3, 2012, in New York City. The social news website BuzzFeed announced Monday it was adding a foreign editor as part of a push to expand its international coverage.

The social news website BuzzFeed announced Monday it was adding a foreign editor as part of a push to expand its international coverage.

BuzzFeed said its new foreign editor will be Miriam Elder, current Moscow bureau chief for The Guardian, and former journalist with Agence France-Presse and The International Herald Tribune. She will start July 25.

Elder "will be responsible for expanding and shaping the social news site's foreign and overseas coverage, building a team of reporters who will break news and cover major world events," BuzzFeed announced.

"Miriam is a great journalist and social web native who has a great sense both for news and for the next big story, as her coverage of the recent political protest in Russia—on the Web, and on Twitter—has shown," said BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith.

"Her deep roots in international news will be vital to bringing this coverage to a new medium and through new forms. Foreign coverage is one of the last spheres where new media haven't competed aggressively with newspapers and television networks. We see an opportunity to reinvent international news for the social age and Miriam is the right person to do it."

Elder said in a statement that BuzzFeed "is the ideal outlet to deliver foreign news coverage in all its heft, fluidity and, at times, absurdity."

BuzzFeed began its operation with links to oddball videos and offbeat stories, and in 2011 hired Smith, a onetime star political reporter, in a bid to produce more original content and send it viral.

News coverage of Washington politicians and their rhetoric appears to have less influence on the American public compared to other news coverage, according to a study by a Michigan State University political scientist.

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